What is CRM?
CRM (Customer relationship management or Client Relationship Management) is a highly adopted strategy for managing an organisations interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. The overall goals are to acquire, develop and retain clients.
By making use of technology, the organisation can organise, automate and synchronise business processes in sales, marketing, customer services and technical support.
Grow revenues.
Increase profits.
Gain market share.
Improve customer retention.
Well known research organisations like Aberdeen, Forrester and Gartner have printed many pages on the subject of the benefits of CRM. There is evidence to show that, when properly deployed, a successful CRM system will increase your revenues by somewhere between 5 and 15%.
Understand your Clients
What is CRM? The trick is to create a customer-centric culture within your business. To have a 360 degree view of the client. Every facet of your business seeing the significance of the relationship and acting in a manner which is commensurate with that relationship – and not working with their own angle on targets and deadlines.
Now marketing can target campaigns effectively and deliver high quality leads to sales. Sales can improve conversion rates and close profitable business. Customer service can work with contented customers and develop up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, and support of the customer base can develop trends to improve profiling for future marketing.
It’s a perfect circle.
The Culture Behind CRM
There are some cultural “musts” that need to be in place before you can realise the “performance guided” culture of the perfect circle.
- Firstly you need accurate data so that keeping track of prospect and customer contact is easy and up to date.
- Then you need the collaborative mind set that allows people to work together really effectively – without departmental imperatives getting in the way of true focus on the customer’s needs.
- Once this culture exists you can start mapping “best practice” from the wide world of CRM onto the specifics of your business. This means doing better things , not just doing things better.
- And finally achieve a level of customer focus which means the business can be managed by looking at trends, KPIs and other measurements – all derived as an automatic by-product of people just doing their jobs through the CRM tool.
So how does this definition of CRM fit with your understanding? Do you think we’ve missed something from the definition? Leave a comment below to let us know!
